Two federal prosecutors have been placed on leave at the direction of the White House after they filed a sentencing memo seeking 27 months in prison for a pardoned Jan. 6 rioter who brought illegal guns and ammunition to former President Barack Obama’s house in 2023.

Two people familiar with the matter confirmed the suspension of the prosecutors from the U.S. attorney’s office for the District of Columbia, though neither person knew exactly what angered White House officials about the memo.

Taylor Taranto, who was arrested in June 2023 while he was livestreaming video near Obama’s house in Washington, D.C., was found guilty in May after a bench trial of possessing illegal guns. He was also convicted on false information and hoaxes charges related to a video he streamed claiming he was on a “one-way mission” to blow up the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland.

Investigators said they found two guns, a machete and hundreds of rounds of ammunition in Taranto’s van when he was arrested. Court records say Taranto repeatedly said he was trying to get a “shot” and that he wanted to get a “good angle on a shot.”

Taranto was among roughly 1,500 Jan. 6 defendants President Donald Trump pardoned on the first day of his second term in office.

Later Wednesday, different prosecutors posted a new sentencing memo that removes all references to the Jan. 6 attacks and also removes a reference to Trump posting Obama’s address on Truth Social, which prosecutors say Taranto saw before going to Obama’s neighborhood.

The prosecutors on his case, Carlos Valdivia and Samuel White, filed a detailed sentencing memo Tuesday asserting that Taranto’s actions “caused the evacuation of a residential neighborhood and forced law enforcement agents from multiple agencies to respond to his false bomb hoax.”

The memo added, “A 27-month sentence reflects the gravity of Taranto’s conduct, his lack of remorse, and the need to deter him and others from engaging in similar threatening conduct.

The memo describes the Jan. 6 events as “thousands of people comprising a mob of rioters attacked the U.S. Capitol while a joint session of Congress met to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election. Taranto was accused of participating in the riot in Washington, D.C., by entering the U.S. Capitol. After the riot, Taranto returned to his home in the State of Washington, where he promoted conspiracy theories about the events of January 6, 2021.”

Amid an attempt at rewriting the history of Jan. 6, Trump and his supporters routinely dismiss the idea that a riot occurred that day, despite the video and other evidence.

Taranto had posted about appearing outside Obama’s residence the same day in June 2023 that Trump shared a screenshot on social media that included what he said was Obama’s Washington address. Prosecutors said Taranto reposted what Trump had shared and then posted about being outside Obama’s home, writing, “We got these losers surrounded!”

The Justice Department declined to comment.

Ken Dilanian

Ken Dilanian is the justice and intelligence correspondent for BLN.

President Donald Trump’s authoritarian rampage has relied on a bold and cynical strategy to bend the public’s perception of reality: abject stupidity.

Just look at the White House’s website right now. There’s a new “Major Events Timeline,” which begins as a seemingly standard sequence of events depicting the evolution of the People’s House, all the way back to George Washington selecting the site, rebuilding after it was set aflame in the War of 1812, and all the way through Richard Nixon’s bowling alley renovation. When the timeline gets to 1998, though, it abruptly transforms into a crude MAGA troll job with a caption highlighting Bill Clinton’s Oval Office sex scandal.

Trump’s “big lie” is, at its core, a witless tantrum thrown by a malignant narcissist who lacks the integrity to accept defeat.

That’s followed by a caption reading “Obama hosts members of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that promotes Islamist extremism and has ties to Hamas.” This is an apparent reference to a 2012 meeting between mid-level National Security Council officials and political representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood in the aftermath of the overthrow of Egypt’s longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak. If the trolling weren’t obvious enough, the caption is accompanied by a photo of Barack Obama wearing a turban during a visit to Kenya in 2006 — nowhere near the White House and years before Obama was president.

From there, the timeline hails Melania Trump’s tennis pavilionmocks Hunter Biden’s cocaine use and rails against Joe Biden hosting a “Transgender Day of Visibility” celebration. Finally, the site gushes over Trump putting tacky gold stuff all over everything in the White House, paving over the Rose Garden, and leveling the entire East Wing.

There is something telling about the official White House website being casually debased by people working at the direction of the most powerful person on the planet — and for no other reason than to “own the libs.”

Trump and MAGA are attempting to rewrite history right before our eyes. They’re also trying to normalize untruths as facts — and they’re weaponizing vulgarity and stupidity to do both.

Take Texas’ lawsuit against the current and former makers of Tylenol, filed by the state’s attorney general Ken Paxton, alleging the companies knew that taking the drug during pregnancy can cause autism. This echoes a conspiracy theory frequently put forth by (who else?) Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, despite studies and major medical groups asserting there’s no evidence such a link exists. But RFK Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement isn’t based on facts or science — it’s strictly vibes, and the MAHA vibes essentially say all modern medicine is bad, including your vaccines, antidepressants and over-the-counter pain medicines.

Pretty much no one — and certainly not craven Mitch McConnell — thought Donald Trump would be a viable political candidate after he attempted a self-coup following his 2020 election defeat and his incitement of a deadly riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The conservative-leaning Supreme Court, including the three justices Trump appointed, declined to even give his evidence-bereft claims of a stolen election a hearing. The Washington Post published an audio recording of him badgering Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn the state’s results.

And if Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney Fani Willis hadn’t bungled the case, there’s a chance the president would be serving prison time in Georgia today. Good luck for Trump, bad luck for justice and the future of American democracy. Trump waited out the storm and retook the presidency.

President Donald Trump’s authoritarian rampage has relied on a bold and cynical strategy to bend the public’s perception of reality: abject stupidity.

Trump’s “big lie” is, at its core, a witless tantrum thrown by a malignant narcissist who lacks the integrity to accept defeat. It should have been consigned to the dustbin of history half a decade ago. Instead, it’s fully canonized in MAGA lore — with tens of millions of Americans believing a thoroughly disproven falsehood. And some of those Americans are now in positions at the federal and state level with authority over elections.

The Justice Department last week said it would send monitors to New Jersey and California ahead of next week’s elections at the request of the Republican Parties in both states. They’ll be looking for voter fraud that’s so exceedingly rare that when the Heritage Foundation (of Project 2025 infamy) attempted to create a comprehensive database of cases, it accidentally disproved its own theory of widespread malfeasance. “To come up with thousands of instances of voter fraud around the country, Heritage staff had to go back decades in time where there have been hundreds of millions of votes cast and a very small number of cases of election fraud have been found, none of which affected election outcomes,” Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution wrote.

And as Trump muses about staying in office beyond the expiration of his term on January 20, 2029there’s a tendency among many people who ought to know better to blow it off as oh-so-much harmless Trump bluster. But Trump’s smart enough to know that overwhelming the public with seemingly asinine ideas and actions creates a disorienting, even blinding effect, blurring the lines between reality and fantasy and making it harder to challenge his lies. In essence, the stupidity is the point.

Anthony L. Fisher

Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and writer for BLN Daily. He was previously the senior opinion editor for The Daily Beast and a politics columnist for Business Insider.

Welcome to “The Blueprint with Jen Psaki” newsletter. Each week, Jen dives into the key players, emerging issues and strategic movements shaping the future of the Democratic Party. Subscribe now to get her insights delivered straight to your inbox.

Raising the bar

I am old enough to remember when Barack Obama wearing a tan suit became a full day’s fodder for the Washington press corps on social media. Since then, the bar for a debilitating scandal has been massively raised. We can thank Donald Trump for this.

Trump has survived potentially career-ending scandals again and again, from the “Access Hollywood” tape to withholding Ukraine aid to the Jan. 6 attack to his felony convictions. His minor scandals come at such a pace you might miss him praising a dictator or questioning back pay for furloughed workers if you don’t watch the news that day.

Voters now may be growing so accustomed to scandal that they look the other way downballot as well. That’s what appears to be happening in Virginia since it came to light that the Democratic nominee for attorney general, Jay Jones, had sent texts suggesting that the speaker of the Virginia House should be shot.

Jones’ poll numbers are down, and he may yet lose the race. But in years past, this would have been the end of his campaign, and it’s not. Trump may be having a secondary effect, too, as voters may be more focused on having an attorney general willing to stand up to the president, regardless of past character defects.

Not that Republicans aren’t trying to seize on scandal. The GOP’s nominee for governor, Winsome Earle-Sears, shifted from a bizarre anti-trans campaign to somehow trying to pin Jones’ texts on her Democratic opponentAbigail Spanberger. Not surprisingly, that hasn’t been working.

In Maine, political newcomer Graham Platner, a candidate for Senate, seems to be surviving a rash of bad news ranging from a tattoo (which he has since covered up) of a symbol associated with the Nazis and old Reddit comments that included downplaying sexual assault and calling himself a communist.

It’s not that Democrats don’t have a very viable, good choice. Popular two-term Gov. Janet Mills is also in the race for the Senate nomination, which should make it fairly easy to pick a nominee without these scandals, but as of this moment Platner is still doing relatively well in polls.

Leading Democrats also seem content to let him ride it out. Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut — someone who is unquestionably a future Senate leader — had this to say: “He sounds like a human being to me, a human being who made mistakes, recognizes them and is very open about it.”

It’s too soon to tell if this is the new normal. Democrats are out of power and desperate to win this November, and then to stop the Trump administration from tearing down more than just the East Wing of the White House.

The bar for scandals has been lowered, but it may also bring more people into the party, including candidates. And when you’re out of power, in every sense of the word, it’s exactly the time to try something different.

Join the Debate

Ask Jen

“Sometime in the future, Trump will be gone. How do we recover?”

— Stephen Glick, Chicago

Hi Stephen,

Don’t think too much about the end of Trump’s presidency. The 2028 election is still a long way off, and that can lead you to feel overwhelmed. Instead, look at the things people are doing right now to push back, including preparing for the crucial midterm elections roughly one year from now, and special elections happening right now. The midterms will be a huge test to determine how much damage will be done before 2028. Get involved now, call your congressional representatives to voice your opinion, and volunteer for campaigns and advocacy groups. You can look at a politician like Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker if you need hope. He created a committee that will archive and catalog all footage and testimonies of interactions with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Chicago so that they can be held accountable at some point in the future. You can also keep tabs on upcoming elections in Virginia and New Jersey and the ballot measure on redistricting in California, which should give you some indication of how voters are feeling.

Every week, Jen selects a question to answer from a newsletter subscriber. If you have a question for Jen, submit it here and subscribe to the newsletter and for a chance to be featured in a future edition.

This week on the podcast

For the latest episode of the brand-new season of “The Blueprint” podcast, I sat down with Democratic Rep. Sarah McBride of Delaware, who talked about how purity tests in the Democratic Party do more harm than good when it comes to welcoming new people in to the coalition. Subscribe now and never miss an episode.

Just Psaki

Jen Psaki is the host of “The Briefing with Jen Psaki”airing Tuesdays through Fridays at 9 p.m. EST. She is the former White House press secretary for President Joe Biden.